ABSTRACT
The rural cantonist and the property-owning noble officer were inseparably tied to the military state. They were the two pillars of the Prussian monarchy that in the course of the second half of the eighteenth century became an additional characteristic of what was felt in the rest of Europe to be an exemplary civil administration. In the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, and this had decisive consequences for Prussian-German social history, over and above the political culture of the whole of the nineteenth century, a social class developed, which, for want of a better term, was called the 'educated bourgeoisie'. The discontent of the underprivileged and the socially neglected, which created a revolutionary bourgeoisie in France, found much less fertile soil in Prussia. Certainly, Prussia's administrative and educated bourgeoisie were imbued with the international ideas of the Enlightenment, which had its most important cultural centres in Germany in Berlin and Konigsberg.
